Transforming Professional Learning - A Conversation with Prof. Rachel Lofthouse

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

You know, we work in extraordinarily performative education settings, trying to demonstrate to somebody externally that we are meeting certain criteria or we are better than somebody else. That has become really ingrained almost in every breath that many teachers take. You know, coaching is not a performance.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me and welcome back to another episode. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. It's increasingly clear that recruiting, developing, and retaining teachers is a very real issue all around the world. And my guest this week, Professor Rachel Loftus, is at the forefront of thinking through how we might be able to address some of these challenges. Rachel is the Professor of Teacher Education in the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University. She has established the Research and Practice Hub CollectiveEd, the Centre for Coaching, Mentoring and Professional Learning. Her research interests focus on the transformation of professional learning through partnerships of scholarship and practice development. She's keen to find out how educational workplaces can both offer and constrain professional learning, with the current focus on coaching and lesson study, and the interrelationships between practice, well-being, professional learning and leadership. Hi, Rachel. It's a real pleasure to be able to chat to you. This topic of professional learning and coaching and mentoring in education is, I think, is an incredibly important topic given how many challenges there are within the profession right now in terms of teacher retention and all of those things, but also all of the questions around how does education evolve to meet the needs of the current complex challenges we're facing and all of those kinds of big questions. What, What does it mean to be a teacher in the 21st, 22nd century and all of that? So these are very big questions, but they are important ones and we've only got an hour. But yeah, the work you're doing at CollectiveEd, which is the Centre for Coaching, Mentoring and Professional Learning at Leeds Beckett, is totally inspiring and interesting. And I'm so really happy to be able to chat to you about some of it. Thank you. Brilliant. So just to kind of set a little bit of the scene, one of the things I saw you, you said on Twitter recently was that at the beginning of a professional learning course for educators, there should always be a reminder that schooling, education, and learning are not synonymous. And that's always been a pet peeve of mine, you know, conflating some of those things. So yeah, what, why did that come up for you? And why, why is that such a relevant thing? Do you think we need to differentiate between those things?

Gosh, it's always quite tricky to remember why things pop into your head. That's true. Even when it's only a week or two ago. However, There's two things I think that I'm connecting here. One of them is going way, way, way back to when I was very much a chalk-faced teacher educator working with colleagues running PGCE programmes in the northeast of England. I remember one of the first lectures really unpacked that relationship between schooling, education, and learning for our student teachers, and I've always thought it was a really essential way to start that PGCE programme regardless of what route it was that had brought the graduates in, you know, whether they were mature graduates or recent graduates, whether they had lots of experience in school or not, lots of other life experience, I think it really distilled something for them about what their roles would be in the future and help them to start to distinguish between some of the language that we might use and misuse. So I do, I keep going back to that moment and always thinking this is an important way to start. And I'm very conscious sometimes of the discussions if sometimes we can only really politely call them discussions, but the tensions that arise on Twitter are often, I think, because we don't spend enough time thinking about the difference. And this concept that we sometimes hear expressed that, you know, schooling is the once in a lifetime chance to get an education. Well, clearly that's nonsense. That's not to say schooling doesn't matter or schools don't matter, It is nonsense to conflate schooling with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to become educated in whatever way we become educated in our lives. But also this sense that just because we, you know, we open a school, we populate a school with students and with adults in a variety of roles, means that learning automatically happens. I don't think those two things are true, or that— yeah, I don't think that is true. And I just think it is really important that if we're going to take this responsible role of our own professional learning because we care about and want to support others in their learning, that we just remind ourselves of some of those conflations that are too easily made.

No, I do think it's interesting. And there are so many assumptions, as you politely called them, discussions on Twitter. They very rapidly descend into slanging matches and all sorts. But there are so many unshared concepts about some of these things we're talking about. Um, but also there's a lot of people talking about, and I, you know, I feel this strongly as well, the schooling in its particular form is a cultural construct of a particular type, and that's important to acknowledge. But as you say, we have constructed that and it's, you know, there are, there is diversity among them and different, different styles or different approaches. But, you know, you could broadly say schooling is kind of broadly similar across the world in its current form. And we could talk about why that is and all of those things, but the fact is we have culturally and historically constructed those institutions for the childcare and for the learning to happen for those young people. And therefore, that's why I had to come back to where I started, that why it's so important to focus on the idea of professional learning purely because whether we like it or not, those institutions do exist. And we have all of these adults who deserve the best possible relational enriching profession in those spaces, cuz they probably, most of them go into the profession committed to the idea of learning. Not the idea of schooling, right? And so how do we, how do we enable them to kind of bring the best out of that given those rigid constraints of this historical product called school?

Yeah, well, I think you're right that it is that anybody who works in those places that we currently call schools deserves the opportunity to do the very best possible work they can and to do that work in such a way that it meets the needs of of many, not just the few, but it also is sustaining and sustainable for them. And the learning component for them is, is so critical. It's not the only thing that matters clearly in terms of maintaining a viable, vibrant workforce, but it is a really important one. And it's, it's also where the individual and the system come together because learning is inevitably, whilst it often happens in social spaces and through social interaction, it is an individual process. We learn as individuals, we shape and change what we can do in our lives through our learning. And so that connection between the individual and the institution or the individual and the culture is really important. And our professional learning is the place where we can do that.

Absolutely. And obviously that's where kind of the nub of where you're working in a way. And I heard you say in a recent conversation that you didn't like the term training when it comes to preparing educators, as you talked about the, you know, students in the PGCE courses, wherever they're coming from, they're not being trained as educators. So what is it about that idea that you struggle with?

I mean, some people get quite, not distressed, but quite concerned if you raise this because there's such an industry that uses training as it's kind of the bottom line language in education. And I'm not saying that we need no training. I just don't think training is adequate. I think we need more than training if we're going to work well in these settings. There are some things which we need really precise, really careful, really well monitored in terms of its impact training. But there are lots of other aspects of our professional working lives that will be enhanced if we see beyond a training mechanism or a training phenomena. In terms of clarifying that, I think it is perfectly reasonable to admit that when we train other people, we have some very clear objectives. We often have a series of procedures or mechanisms that we need them to adopt in a particular setting or at a particular time. I mean, think about, you know, the amazing survival of those passengers on the flight that caught fire recently. I can't remember where it was now, but there was— it was so widely appreciated that those flight attendants and staff pilots had had the best possible training to get people out of that situation. So we, we need training for those processes that need to happen well. But training isn't enough because training is about, if you like, it allows you to kick in with the routines when they're needed, but it can also blind you to the opportunities, I think, for other ways of being or other ways of acting that might actually be much more fertile. And in education, if we don't create fertile ground for others to learn from, then we're, you know, we're reducing it down to a series of bullet points to learn and regurgitate often.

Exactly. Absolutely. I mean, that's what I was thinking of the idea of procedures as you were talking there. It's like we turn it into just a whole load of scripts and procedures and recipes for how to create this thing called learning. But what we really know intuitively, as we've been teachers in, you know, it's the most complex dance of intuitive. And of course there's, there are some routines and things that it's useful to know and the scaffold, the process. But actually so much of it is this relational intuitive process that emerges in collaboration and in connection with the learners and the environments you're working in, I would say.

Yes. And the other way of looking at that is that training often has a convergent component. So we're taking, you know, a group of people who may actually also work in quite diverse settings now or in the future, and we're anticipating that the greatest benefit is if they converge on a single point. You know, they've all learned something at a key moment in time, or a chosen moment, it might not be a key moment in time. They've all learned the same thing and they've all demonstrated the same outcomes. Training often has that convergent component, whereas actually learning is much more divergent, and it's the divergence that creates the unique teachers. It's the divergence that creates the teachers who are able to respond reflexively and reflectively and relationally in the moments when they most need to, because they're not hamstrung by that convergent thinking.

Yeah, no, interesting. And actually it kind of feels like we're already getting into the space of the coaching stuff that I really want to talk to you about, because in our previous conversation you said, before we had coaching, we had staff rooms. And we've all seen a kind of an upsurge of interest in coaching in education as a way to approach some of that skill development and capability development for educators. Do you feel like what you've just been saying about the relationality and the individual approach, is that one of the reasons why we've seen so much interest in coaching as a form of professional learning recently?

That is an interesting proposition. I don't know that anybody has been able to do a full analysis of quite why there's such a surge in coaching practice in schools, but I think we have some pretty clear sense of what might be influencing that. So for example, quite often nowadays we see schools and we draw parallels between them as institutions and workplaces with other businesses. And we're also talking about, you know, we want to recruit people who otherwise might go and work in the corporate world. We're not doing very well at doing that at the moment, but never mind. And so sometimes there is a perfectly logical looking outwards from education and discovering what people in other employment settings might benefit most from. And coaching does have a very high regard in a lot of the corporate world, particularly around leadership. Uh, also we have a huge surge of life coaching. We're filling some of the spaces maybe that we don't necessarily want therapy or counseling, but we do want those opportunities to reflect and and think for ourselves about where our life journey might take us and how we can influence that. Now, I know that that is probably quite a privileged minority who can engage in life coaching, but that sort of acceptance of coaching in the wider world as being something that is generally seen as beneficial, aspirational as well, is perhaps one of the things that allows it to filter into the consciousness of educators because we're We are perfectly rightly trying to do the right thing by the people who work in our sector. So I think there may be some of that. I think without doubt, in countries like England, quite a lot of the previous infrastructure that created both formal and informal opportunities for networking, from learning from others, gaining insight on other, from other people's expertise, having, you know, opportunities to have conversations that might you know, give you that moment to reflect, to share some concerns, to think through some dilemmas with an empathetic and informed colleague. I think quite a lot of those opportunities and spaces have been reduced, and I think there's loads of multiple reasons for that, including the simple designing of our school buildings, which I know— I saw it happen often in the early 2000s in England. When new buildings were built, they were built without staff rooms. Or if they were called staff rooms, they were kind of pockets of staff rooms, particularly in big secondaries, spread around a campus.

Yes, true.

With a desk and a laptop, and this is where you'll go if you have got some time available. Then of course we have less and less and less time in schools, fewer staff, more demanding curriculum, more expectations on managing children's behaviour, you know, in the transitions between lessons, in the playtime, in the lunchtime. That means that there are fewer staff available just to sit and chat. And it's an easy thing to say, let's do split lunchtimes in order to manage the resource we've got in our kitchen.

Sure.

But actually, as soon as you do something like split lunchtimes, you're dividing your staff, not deliberately, but inevitably, into different time zones, which means that they can't find that 5-10 minutes to have the kind of conversation that I know I benefited from hugely. And in terms of staffrooms, I've just— I'm in the midst of analyzing quite a lot of data about teachers' perceptions of staffrooms. And it's fascinating because they're not all lovely places. They don't all create the best place for professional conversation. But what certainly seems to be coming through is that they are places that have changed, if they still exist at all, or if they do exist, their places are less well used than they were in the past. So therefore, inevitably, there are fewer of those informal but still in the professional context conversations. So I think we're kind of looking at the outside world, loss of some of the opportunities that we otherwise would have had, but also just this entrepreneurial spirit that has gripped education for good and possibly not always for good, which is allowing people to work with teachers and with leaders in a wider variety of ways. And is it's creating a marketplace of services and coaching has gone into that marketplace.

Yeah, no, that's, that's fascinating. There's so much there. I mean, one thing I'd love to pick up on just that, as you were, that kind of, it's almost like the logic of efficiency has squeezed out the times and it's squeezed out the places because they're not seen as somehow efficient uses of space or time, right? It's like, you know, I remember distinctly standing outside the staff room in my secondary school and just what, oh, you know, all these teachers milling around and you just, you always wonder as a student, what's what's going on in there. But actually there's so much going on in there, isn't there? In terms of rich exchanges, informally, sometimes formally, whatever, you know, whatever. But it's not something you can put on a spreadsheet or it's not something you can, you know, define by outcomes. And therefore, well, of course we can squeeze that. We don't need that bit. The efficiency logic steps in.

And I mean, I do, I mean, you know, I've worked in schools as a teacher, but because I was a teacher educator for, and for about 12 14 years I was on a regular basis going into schools, probably over 100 schools in that period of time. The staff room was a place where you might first go and meet your student before you went to see them teach, or the place where you sat down with the mentor and had a cup of tea and chatted about how the student was doing. Again, it sounds odd, you know, I feel very familiar with staff rooms, and so I'm not judging my kind of sense of their decline just on the basis of 2 or 3 settings, but actually on both my experience across many, many schools, but also this, this piece of research that I'm doing, which I think is revealing some interesting stuff. But you're right, that space which was unique to teachers and probably also teaching assistants, learning mentors, but even just the question of, is, is the headteacher, executive headteacher, whatever, are they a part of the staffroom community or are they apart from it? It's interesting. Those sorts of dynamics. But that's not so much about coaching, it's about staff rooms.

It's true. No, and organizational culture, a lot of it's seeded there, isn't it? But yeah, and I'd love to pick up on the commercialization, kind of that entrepreneurial point. Maybe we can come back to that. But maybe it's useful just in what you've been saying about training and then a bit about coaching is to just differentiate a little bit because I think as I've heard you talk about the way that you do some of the work of inducting new developing educators into the profession, that might not be a coaching conversation, that might be more of a mentoring process. And I think, you know, given you are focusing on all of them, it might be useful just to kind of pass out what the differences are between those things. 'Cause you've got mentoring, you've got coaching, and then you've got this other concept called co-coaching, which I would love to ask you about as well. 'Cause I think it's fascinating. So what would you, just briefly, how would you pass those things as separate concepts?

I think my appreciation of them and understanding of them is still being shaped. And so I wouldn't say this was definitive. And I think other people would have slightly different interpretations.

Sure.

My sense at the moment is that mentoring is essential when somebody is new in a role or new into a context. And that can be at any point in their professional life. That one of the benefits of having a really good mentoring program is it can be organized to meet both the needs of the organization that somebody's joining or the role that somebody is taking up, but also recognizing that it's an individual in that space. So, you know, in a secondary school, for example, and, you know, I can draw examples from primary as well, but in a big secondary school in England, you might imagine now 8 or 9 new starters every year. And many of them will be early career teachers.

Yeah.

So their experience of schools to date will be not minute, but will be limited. And potentially their experience of the school that they are entering into as an employee is minimal because, you know, most people will end up working for the first time in a school they didn't train in. And I use the word training there because we know that that's how the policy is always framed and the language is always used. So, um, In that case, it's absolutely vital that somebody feels that they are being acknowledged, a) as new enrollee, and that their needs will be related to the fact that they're new enrollee or the context is unfamiliar to them, that they will need that process of induction. And alongside that induction, they will benefit from some individual mentoring to help them navigate that new context and the new role and help them feel as if they are able to succeed in that space, because most of these roles will be challenging at one point or another. So the mentoring is, for me, is essential. And as I say, navigates the institutional and the individual needs at a particular point. Coaching, you could say, well, wouldn't coaching just be doing the same thing but maybe with a slightly different process? And the argument, of course, would be yes, to some extent, especially if a school is dedicating an amount of money or time or people to the process of coaching, then of course the school is doing that for the motive that it will help, not just help the individual, help the school. So perhaps one of the ways to think about coaching is that it's often used at a point not so much of induction or new starters, but that it's really about enabling change and enabling growth.

Mm-hmm.

So rather than just maintaining the status quo, perhaps what coaching can do is create the opportunities for change and growth. And that doesn't mean that there's a single way to do it right. It also doesn't mean that we always privilege the individual over the institutional, because an organization adopting a coaching approach, the assumption we can make is that they're looking to grow through developing and supporting the people who are being coached. There's all sorts of interesting other kind of ways of looking at it. So it would not be the case that you could argue that, well, you need a mentor, you know, for 6 months, and then you need a coach for 6 months. Although that might work for one individual, it's not necessarily the case that the mentor and the coach have to be different people, although that might work in some cases. So the other way of looking at it is more that the difference between mentoring and coaching is a stance, and there's a degree of fluidity, and that they exist on a spectrum. And that actually, if you are a really capable mentor/coach, you can switch between those two stances as is appropriate to the individual, the context, the moment, and what they are trying to achieve. So if you're switching between two stances, what does that mean? Well, I think it means that in coaching, you're acknowledging that the growth is most likely to happen from the point at which the individual being coached sets the agenda, where they start to identify the things that they're curious about, interested in, aware of, the aspects of their role that they want to acknowledge as being significant to them, and also the tensions in their role that they acknowledge as significant to them. And it's exploring those moments, those opportunities that perhaps switches you more into a coaching stance than a mentoring stance, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that's, I, it really does make sense. I find that really useful as a frame, but also just to kind of throw an additional piece into that frame. What about the idea of a coach not needing to have professional expertise in order to be a good coach? Because that's something I've always wondered about. Because as you mentioned with the previous answer about the commercialization in a way of, of coaching and, you know, it's everywhere and, the idea that someone not from education, not from teaching, doesn't understand a staffroom or a school or, you know, any kind of educational background can be an effective coach in an educational setting. I don't know, what do you think about that?

There's a whole host of things associated with that expertise and where the expertise lies and also the way that we name things. So, and again, my thinking is shifting a little bit on this at the moment. I do think we need to be careful about who we name as coaches or who claims the name of coach.

Okay.

I think there's a difference between saying, I am a coach, to saying, I use coaching approaches in my role. So I might be a mentor and I use coaching approaches sometimes in my role. I might be a leader or a colleague, or I might be, you know, a governor, and sometimes I use coaching approaches in my role. But that doesn't necessarily mean I can claim the title of coach. They might have the title of coach for other reasons, but I think there are, you know, there is a difference. I don't claim the title of coach, but I would say I use coaching across a whole host of my, if you like, working practices, a whole host of them. I think to be able to say that you are a coach requires that you have some kind of credible qualification and expertise that is validated by others. Now that doesn't have to be a really formal industry, you know, nominated accreditation. It could be something that is quite specific and it's come through a particular training route, you know, that you— and you've demonstrated that you have acquired a set of skills and expertise that allows you to work effectively as a coach with others. But I do think that to call yourself a coach, you need to have— be able to say, this is where my credentials lie. So, you know, that, and I might be the right or wrong kind of coach in this setting or for you, but this is where my credentials lie. But of course, none of that stops us more widely in education saying the coaching approach helps in certain types of contexts.

Yeah. It's almost back to the idea of it just being a relational process because it's like, what do I notice in this situation here? Does this person I'm speaking to, or this, you know, we're we're engaging, do they need more of a mentoring approach? Like, you know, you step into that stance, or do they need more of a coaching approach? And if you've got some understanding and obviously you need some degree of training in what those approaches are, but to an extent there's a humanity and relationality of just noticing what a person might need and responding, right? Responsiveness.

Absolutely. So there's a huge reliance on being really fully present. In that moment and with that other person. You know, the discipline of noticing is really, really vital, not just assuming and not just looking at your checklist and looking up to see if I've studied something. There's something quite significant about noticing and then thinking about how you use what you've noticed. But as well as noticing, a really significant component of that relational work is listening. And all of those things allow the whole to be much more fully appreciated than just the thing I've sliced off for attention today. But yes, I think it all— both coaching and mentoring are relational practices, and the ability to deploy one over the other is based on your relational expertise and your sensitivity to the context. So the first question, and we haven't touched on at all is, is it possible for a coach to work well in an education setting with very little education expertise? Well, if they are a really well-qualified and really attuned coach and they have expertise as a coach, then yes, they bring that expertise.

Yeah.

It's like saying, you know, would this child benefit from a speech and language therapist with their knowledge and expertise more than they'd benefit from me as a teacher? With my kind of observed, you know, trade, if you like, but I might be able to— of course they benefit from an expert speech and language therapist if their needs demanded that, much more than they might benefit from me as a teacher thinking I knew what would work well. So an expert coach can make a big difference and doesn't have to necessarily have the education background, but the limits of their work also need to be understood. Their work is individual, they're not necessarily understanding the context.

Yeah. And it's almost like thinking that they know, as you just said, is almost, or can be a danger in the context of, because there may be, you may slip back into more of a stance of mentoring. Because if you think you know what they should do, what's the right kind of move as a professional or pedagogical move or whatever for that person, you might actually want to guide them more explicitly towards that rather than someone without that kind of baggage of professional expertise would be much more open to the attunement and the noticing and the responsiveness, maybe.

And then the whole question also comes back down to being really pragmatic and really sensitive. So, you know, I do— it was an offhand statement, but I remember saying, you know, we haven't got the luxury of time in very many education settings. We can't wait for the answer to emerge from somebody's big tome. Just because as a coach I've taken 3 or 4 sessions to allow that knowledge or insight that they somehow have embodied in them to emerge. You know, in, in true coaching, it might take a long time for that embodied implicit knowledge to sort of make its way back up to the surface, um, that tacit knowledge to kind of be articulated in a way that kind of reconnects with the here and now, as opposed to just sits in the background. Um, and you'd have— you have to be a very expert coach to help somebody get there. And we haven't got enough expert coaches to wait that long. We haven't got enough time, which is why, that's why we need mentoring. Sometimes we need to be a bit more hands-on and directive.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Again, it's the kind of pragmatics of the efficiency of the, the fact that just the sheer fact that we don't have the time. So therefore what we'd like to do in this dreamy scenario, just functionally and practically isn't possible. In busy squeezes.

And the real risk with that, however, is that then we switch into, therefore it's going to be more efficient if we all just—

Exactly.

We'll do this thing, it will be much more efficient. We can also monitor it all in a certain time span, and we're going to call it coaching because that looks better.

It does.

There's a very slippery slope.

It is. But isn't that just one of the key moves right now in those kinds of institutions where that efficiency and that, like, you know, the kind of neoliberal economics and the, you know, all of that new public management kind of stuff has seeped in, holding that space for those things, even if they're not quite as big a spaces as you'd like, but holding a bit of that space for some of this work seems just really important. I don't know.

I think, and I think there's lots and lots of components of trying to understand what's gone on, why it's gone on. Whether it's good or whether it's bad. And one of them is the whole, you know, you talked about the neoliberal organizations. You know, we work in extraordinarily performative education settings. It's not a word that everybody's familiar with, but that sense of trying to demonstrate to somebody out externally that we are meeting certain criteria or we are better than somebody else, that it has become really ingrained, not just at a kind of high level, but actually almost in every kind of breath that many teachers take, you know, coaching is not a performance. And of course, this is where we start getting into the, okay, performance coaching, right? So performance coaching for, you know, executive leaders or for high-flying sports people that, you know, okay, coaching might lead to better performance, but the coaching itself isn't a performance, and you're not performing for the coach. There's another reason, and I do think that we have got ourselves a little bit wrapped up in the coaching itself is the performance. And the performing for the coach to meet their expectations of us has taken priority over other things.

Yeah, it's somehow everybody's engaged in the, the dance of trying to perform for the expectations of the organizational outcomes that we need. And coaching is one piece of that dance in order to, to perform and provide the outcomes that we're expected to produce. Yeah, no, interesting. I mean, that's the commercialization not of it, I think it probably hasn't helped with that either. But I want, I'm conscious of time and I really want to talk about your Rapid project because I think from what I understand, what you seem to have done there through the research is to acknowledge so much of those more embodied implicit approaches that we all have as humans in these institutions, whether, wherever the structures are, however they're imposed on us, it still happens. The narratives of how do I make sense of my experience? Of being in this space with you, with these young people, that kind of phenomenology of teaching, which you, you've talked about, that seems really a profound, I think, thing that's been happening within that project. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what the RAPID project was about in trying to identify what the role of narrative was in supporting teacher development.

Okay. So the RAPID project was one of several Erasmus projects that we were fortunate to be partners in, and indeed Leeds Beckett Through my colleague's work, Marie Beaton, we were the lead partners of that project. It was in response to the pandemic. There were obviously thousands of projects that were reasonably quickly put together and actually had a shorter timeframe than many of the other Erasmus projects. It was only a 2-year one because I think it was that sense of we need to learn urgently. We need to understand what's going on now and we need to learn urgently, not kind of let this drift away. So it— we had partners, including partners from the Netherlands, from Germany, from Hungary, Portugal, Scotland, England, and I'll have missed a couple. Apologies to the people I've missed, but— oh, Slovenia. It was truly pan-European, and it was about understanding how teachers and other educators actually had both responded to and learned from the situations they found themselves in as a result of the COVID pandemic. And we felt that it was really important to, along with many other researchers, to hear the stories of the teachers and learners and other educators, teacher educators, and actually parents as well, about how they had responded in relation to that crisis. So the narratives were a way into understanding those experiences. They allowed it to be very personalized. They allowed us to recognize very quickly that not everybody had the same pandemic as everybody else.

Yeah.

You know, obviously different countries responded, you know, a little bit differently in relation to their periods of lockdown or their resources that were made available or, you know, the legislation, etc. But there was also, relatively unusually, this common global phenomenon that nobody could just ignore. And it, you know, created this huge interruption. So this moment of, you know, we were boundary crossing. We were going from what it was like this last week, and now all of a sudden it's like this, and that is the, you know, that boundary was substantial. So by gathering the narratives, we were, if you like, giving voice to educators. We were giving credit to them. We were saying, we'll learn about professional learning from you, you know, to some extent, acknowledging that in this very new world, much of what we might have assumed in the past will itself have been interrupted in relation to professional learning. And they then became the— yeah, well, they became the data set for this piece of work. So we interviewed, or we invited some written responses for people who weren't able to, you know, to engage in an interview, and we just collected these narratives. They were framed around some common core questions, which I can't right now remember, but they allowed, if you like, that synthesis of experience into a shape of a story, but that was true.

Yeah. The thing that struck me was that it's not really about the pandemic. It was like there was so much kind of, so much learning in that, which seemed to be just really relevant to any human experience. And obviously we're talking about education, but how do humans show up in a space? And you know, as you talked about their realities, their responses, and their reimaginings. And then what were their reflections on all of those three things, which, yeah, just, just felt really, it transcended anything to do with the pandemic. It was just like, how do we make sense of experience in order to grow and change or to respond to crises or whatever it is?

Yes, that's true. And we, and again, you know, it happened at a particular time, well, ongoing and similar sorts of interruptions in education. Have happened, but perhaps in more localized ways. So, you know, some of our European partners were working in schools where there was a significant influx, a welcomed influx of Ukrainian refugees at that point in time. So we have other, if you like, reasons to need to reimagine. The reimagining is quite important. It's that sense of we have the capacity to draw on our experiences, to draw on our beliefs, our kind of creative thinking, and to reposition ourselves into the future. So when we captured the narratives, we didn't capture them around those four headings, the Four Rs as they became called. What was your reality? How did you respond? The reflections and the reimaginings. And they kind of swirl around each other. They're not kind of linear particularly. But it was in the process of collectively reading the narratives and reviewing them and talking about them that we recognized that those were the common elements. So we then, yeah, we re-interrogated Soundspheres, but we, we drew from those narratives, those components. And then you're right, what it does is it— I think because it was a moment of boundary crossing, the reimagining came quite naturally. It was almost inevitable. It was essential because, yeah, okay, I can't go back into that classroom. I can't get those students back into one room. I've You've got kids who are living in very different family circumstances that might all officially be now home learning, but what does that mean? It means something very different for each one. So you have to reimagine. You can't just retreat into what's familiar. But even then, you're not starting from scratch. So the reimagining is not a kind of, you know, ground zero and it's a complete flip into a new world. You are drawing on what you already know, what you already can do, what resources you have. But also what you might previously have thought was possible and now is essential, or now is possibly the best route, if not the essential route. So that reimagining is important. And what we then did in that project was we used that shape of the reality, the response, the reflections, and the reimaginings to create what we called co-coaching. So if you like, a practice of a sitting and being with another person in conversation, which allowed those four components to be further explored and revealed. Whether it came after or not after writing a narrative was, you know, it's not essential we have a narrative, but the co-coaching allows a narrative to be built. So that's what we did, and then we tested that out in a number of different settings just as a way of working with others, and it has proved to be a nice new approach to coaching. Nice is a soft word, but I like it. It's a nice new approach.

I like it too. Yeah, absolutely. And just to give one example, I heard you talking about the Ruber example. So you used Ruber as a case in point of a maths teacher who'd come in from a— she was an estate agent before and she'd start as a teacher and they were looking at her narratives and it just like one of the ways she reimagined herself was, I'm not just a maths teacher, I'm a significant adult in their lives. So there's a kind of, it's not even necessarily a practical reimagining, but there's just a reframing of my position in relation to the young people that I'm working with. Despite all of the rigid structures that might surround me, I have control over some of that reimagining and reframing, which I thought was really, yeah, really interesting.

Yeah. And, and of course those sorts of moments of insight can come perfectly, you know, reasonably, they will come at some point in most teachers' careers. And what you're not trying to do is force a particular insight, but you're trying to create the spaces where the individual can genuinely think, reflect, position themselves in the future. Because we talked at the very beginning, or we alluded at the very beginning, to the real problems we have of teacher recruitment and retention. One of the problems I think that leads to poor retention is it's really hard for some of our educators to see themselves in the setting in the future because that setting is becoming uncomfortable for them, or the workload is becoming too great for them, or it— and they can't reimagine themselves into their own future role in education, so they leave.

Yeah, and that's actually one of the things about the bureaucratization that you're talking about there, is like the increase, and Yeah, we've spoken about it earlier, but the, that kind of increasing deadening, you could say, of the profession into these procedures and spreadsheets and all of those things, which really, yeah, which doesn't enrich the experience of the humans in the system and the relationality that they want. And therefore coaching seemed to be, from what I've heard you saying, that it's a space where it protects from that bureaucratization. Is that how you see it?

Yeah, I think so. I think for me, that would be one of the true qualities of coaching, that it is not a bureaucratic process. It's a very human practice. It creates a different flavor of space for somebody to be in, in their role, and for them to think about what their ambitions are. But it's not that sense of ambitions, again, with a little a, as opposed to the grand ambitions, you know, the big career steps. It's the kind of, okay, how might I be tomorrow? How might I, my understanding have changed if I just take a moment to learn? You know, and from coaching, hopefully there will be moments where you think, you know what, I don't yet know enough and my coach isn't the expert, so I need to explore something in order to feel more informed, more confident in this space. So there's all sorts of possible outcomes from coaching. And we did mention the kind of, you know, what's a coach or what's coaching, what's mentoring? And you brought in co-coaching. And then I said we use the term co-coaching. The REPID project. And just to clarify, we used it— there was a pragmatic reason for using it, and that was because we're a European project where everything ends up being translated into English, ironically. And a lot of the materials, a lot of the sessions that you run with European partners are in English. And we needed something which— we definitely were happy with the term coaching, but we wanted something to simply state what that— what kind of coaching we might be promoting. So Co-coaching became something that didn't seem like itself was a barrier. We hadn't put a complicated term in, but also the essence of it was this is coaching, not you're sitting with a qualified coach, and co-coaching being something that can happen reciprocally between colleagues. What you're doing is you're using a particular conversational motive and structure to underpin a coaching-type conversation in relationship with another person. And that was, I think, therefore an appropriate use of the term co-coaching.

Yeah. And it kind of democratizes it somehow. You know, it doesn't take you back into that space of the commercial credentials and, you know, have you done the training to become a coach? It's just this relation— again, relational process that is open and available.

And like we do when we're supporting learners, we scaffold that learning. You know, we provide frameworks, we provide structure. Similarly, a lot of the work that I do on coaching, we end up with a scaffold. So some STEM questions. And I think there's a risk when you look at some of the materials that come out is that it starts to look like a script.

Yeah.

But they're not scripts, they're scaffolds. But if you're doing something for the first time and you're a little bit unsure of, well, how might this flow, having some questions that are tried and tested— is a really helpful— is a gift, really, to the person taking the coaching role.

No, absolutely. No, really. I mean, really helpful because I think you don't need them after a while. But that's the point of a scaffold, right? You just start with it. You use it more formally at the beginning, and then gradually you don't need it anymore. And then the scaffolding's disappeared. So can I just in the last final moments just ask you about your most recent paper about the pedagogy of noticing? Because you mentioned noticing earlier, and it's a word I love, and I think it's really interesting and important about some of the kind of dispositions we actually need to develop now. That's a bigger conversation, but what is it that you and, and your co-authors on that meant by a pedagogy of noticing?

Right. So Lisa is a colleague of mine at Leeds Beckett University. She's senior lecturer. She, her expertise is in, well, from the outside, it looks like she's a drama expert, but she's so, so much more than that. She's an oracy expert. She works very much embedded in professional learning in some of our, some really challenging and interesting, challenging and interesting schools. And that particular piece comes from a project that was funded by the Paul Hamlyn Trust, I think, or teacher development funded project. And the focus there was about working with teachers and artists. So this is one of Lisa's specialisms, is bringing together teachers and artists. To work to create curriculum and pedagogy that is really thoughtful, thought-provoking, and often draws a lot on narrative and story weaving, kind of like we were doing with our teachers.

Yeah.

There was a coaching component to that, which essentially, again, created this space in which ideas could be articulated, tested out, reflection could be promoted, learning might happen, insights might be gained. But the idea of the pedagogy of noticing. So we're not the only people who would use that sort of term, but it is this idea that if pedagogy is about creating opportunities for learning, we have to recognize that we often learn through and from what we notice, or we can disregard what is right in front of us and learn nothing from it. So it's a bit more about promoting this active stance as an educator of noticing what's going on so that you can make fine-tune decisions in the moment, but also you have more to reflect upon when you're thinking, what next? Or how do I plan tomorrow's lessons? How do I build a curriculum that's based on what I see working really well here for my, my learners, my pupils? And it was really useful there because we had the artists and the teachers working together, so they were bringing their two different perspectives and expert lenses, and they were physically working together to plan and teach and debrief and, you know, continue planning over a 2-year period. So it wasn't just a one-off or a quick blast, it was a good 2-year period. So that deliberate noticing what's different, or noticing what you bring, or noticing how the children change, was an absolutely fundamental part of how they were learning to develop, enhance their pedagogic approaches. So yeah, it's an active decision about this is one of the ways I will learn if I really take the time to notice. It's not about noting everything down in a tally chart.

No, it's not about putting it in your spreadsheet.

Yeah, it's not about that. It's not about formality of observation. It's about being in the moment.

Absolutely.

And noticing.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's fascinating. And there's so much there. I think that is an important— they're almost kind of the intuitive professional insights that historically people would've argued come from just lots and lots of expertise and mastery in a particular domain. And that's the whole, you know, the old kind of chess examples and this multiple schemas. And you know, it's all explained by how much knowledge you've got in your long-term memory and therefore you're noticing patterns, et cetera. Personally, I don't buy that. Obviously there's a component of that, but I think there's something, there's a dispositional as you say, kind of presence somehow, a bit of showing up, being fully present in order to allow yourself to notice some things that are different or have changed since last time you saw these young people or whatever, or as you say, in contrast to the other professionals and the way that they're working, what are you noticing in between? I think, you know, I think it's such an important topic.

And I think just as a really important caveat, I think one of the first things that disappears when teachers become anxious is that ability to notice.

Yeah, that's so true.

No, it could come from any source, but anxiety will absolutely eradicate the ability to notice.

Yeah, I can feel that just from a very personal, you know, when you get stressed, you go, you, you focus down into kind of tunnel vision and you, you don't have that kind of expansive attending or awareness that you would otherwise have. So yeah, that's a really interesting point. Wow. Thank you. Loads more to be said, but this is beautiful. Thank you so much for your time, Rachel. It's really lovely to chat.

It was lovely. Thank you for your questions. I loved how you pulled out different threads. It was great. Thank you.

Amazing. Thank you so much. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.